AJ Jacobs (Living Consititionally)

#UC-Transcript

Srini Rao:

AJ, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

AJ Jacobs

Good one.

Yes. Great.

AJ Jacobs

I am delighted to be back. Thank you, Srini.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you back here. So you have a new book out called A Year of Living Constitutionally, all of which we will get into. And I was just looking back at the transcript to see what I had asked you last time you were here to make sure I didn't ask the same question. But I want to start by asking you, what is one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up being with your life in your career?

AJ Jacobs

Well, that's a lovely question. I always love these opening questions. So I was, I was intrigued to see. Well, let me give you two quick ones from my dad. I was once, I remember I was like maybe 12 or so, and I was playing squash with him and I lost a point and I just, I was, you know, I was a jerk. I was very immature. So I threw my racket and I, I started cursing and he said, listen, he wasn't angry. He just said,

Listen, you have got to try, you're only here once. Life is very short. Really just try to enjoy every second. And I love that, the sort of Epicurean way of life. You've got to really enjoy it. And this idea of losing a point in squash is not worth getting angry about. That's not gonna make my life better. And let me give you one other, which was,

that he, my father, we were on a road trip and we had to go to the bathroom really badly. And we stopped at a hotel and used their bathroom, but my father gave the hotel a dollar or two because he said, you know, we used their napkins, we used their water, we took up.

a little bit of their resources. So we shouldn't just take it without giving them something. And it's a little over the top, I think. But I also, I love the idea. I love the idea of being so mindful of others that you would leave money for using their paper towels in the bathroom.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, your books make so much more sense now. F .J., you told me your little John McEnroe moment.

AJ Jacobs

I was a super brat. Just without the talent. That's the problem.

Srini Rao:

That's what I was thinking. I was like, that sounds very like a John McEnroe moment for a teen.

AJ Jacobs

That's exactly it. Yeah, he needed some kind of behavioral therapy. I think he could have really benefited.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, well, instead he got to become a tennis superstar and narrate a TV show on Netflix.

AJ Jacobs

That is true. I guess there are.

Srini Rao:

which might be the wrong lesson people learned from that. It's like, oh, so that's what happened if you have that kind of attempt.

AJ Jacobs

Right. Unfortunately, our society does seem to reward outrage and tantrums. But I don't think it's good for you or society. So I say be more like Bjorn Borg, who no one remembers, but who is very calm.

Srini Rao:

Yeah.

Srini Rao:

Yeah.

Srini Rao:

Well, you know, the thing that strikes me most, I mean, you talk about this idea of living, you know, enjoying every moment. And it seems like this is a running theme through a lot of the work that you do. Like, I'm really curious how you go about choosing. You did the year of living biblically and, uh, well, you know, there was some pretty funny references to that, but how do you decide? Like what made you think, okay, you know what, what I want to do is live by the, the, the original words of the constitution for a year.

AJ Jacobs

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I have lots of ideas. We talked about this last time, which I also listened to, because I didn't want to repeat myself. And we had a lovely conversation, by the way, folks, if you haven't heard it. I enjoyed it. And I hope you will too. But this one might even be better. So I guess the, I try to do, I have a lot of ideas and a lot of them are not that good. So.

Uh, it's, but I do believe it's a numbers game. I think that you have to be, to be creative. You have to just come up with tons of ideas and find those jewels among the mud or whatever the, uh, the metaphor might be. And for me, one way to tell what might resonate with others is if it, if it has something really impactful to say about what's going on today.

So, you know, I could write a book about learning to play the French horn. I might even enjoy trying to become the best French horn player. Wait, weren't you a tuba player? That's funny. I could become a tuba player. That might be, but I'll leave that to you. But to me, that's not my passion. Instead, I wanted to do something that had real relevance to me and to others.

Srini Rao:

I was.

AJ Jacobs

So for this Constitution book, I knew very little about the Constitution. I had not even read it. I knew the preamble from Schoolhouse Rock, that might date me, but I knew I had never read it from top to bottom. But every day when I opened the news, there was another article about how the Constitution was affecting my life in a real way and millions of others.

Srini Rao:

Mm -hmm.

AJ Jacobs

And I said, you know what, I would really like to understand this more. And one, the way, as you know, the way I like to understand things is by dive in and live them and walk the walk and talk the talk and carry the musket and wear the buckled shoes and wear the tricorn hat and really quarter the soldiers in my apartment, just to really go all in to try to understand this document and how we should.

treat it today and hopefully by the end, my hope was I would feel a little bit more empowered, a little bit better about democracy, which is something because you read the news, it's very depressing a lot of the time. So, and it did, I think it made me much more optimistic and I feel much more empowered and I feel like I understand it. It's complicated, but I feel I understand it much more than I did.

Srini Rao:

Mm -hmm.

Srini Rao:

Well, you know, I think that one of the things that strikes me about you saying that, like, I've lived in the United States since 1986. And I don't think I'm alone. I'm guessing even most American born citizens who've been here their entire lives couldn't tell you a damn thing about what is actually in the Constitution. You know, like we know about the Second Amendment because it's in the news all the time. Every day there's a shooting. So we're like, okay, that's, you know, something we know about. Based on this, like one of the things I'm really curious about is you made

AJ Jacobs

Right?

Srini Rao:

a bit of reference to it in the book about how we teach this in school, because I took them at AP American history. I didn't know a damn thing about any of the things I read about in your book. Like literally, I was like, oh, wow, this is mind boggling. Like I didn't, I either that I don't remember it because I wasn't paying attention.

AJ Jacobs

Oh really? Interesting.

AJ Jacobs

Right, well that's interesting. I think, yeah, we definitely don't teach it in an interesting way. I think we either sort of worship it as this divine set of parchment pages dictated by these demigods, or we focus on the downsides that it was written by some...

men who own, some of them who own slaves. And, but it's neat, it's a complicated document. It's got good and it's got bad. It's like, I like one of my advisors, this Harvard professor, Larry Tribe said, it's like quantum mechanics. It's both a wave and a particle. It's both a document of oppression and elitism, but.

It also has these strains of democracy and freedom and equality. So it's up to us to roll up our sleeves and try to focus on the ladder and try to make it live up to its best ideals. Like Frederick Douglass says, it's a promissory note. It's a promissory note and America has not always lived up to it.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, you know, I saw this documentary once, I think it was, it might have been a world in this area, it might have been a documentary with Obama and Vice News where he and some journalists were talking about this idea that democracy is an ideal that we have been trying to live up to. Like, you know, it's not set in stone. But I think that as weird as this is, let's talk about the beginning, like the actual creation of this document that effectively has

kind of shaped our history as a country.

AJ Jacobs

Yeah. I mean, well, in the beginning it was, it was not necessarily that democratic because it was first of all, only white men could vote. So it has been sort of a struggle over the decades and centuries to try to expand we the people to mean actually we all the people, except for people under 18. They don't count. There are actual movements of people who want to have kids vote, but I don't think they've gotten very far.

So anyway, yes, it has been, and the beginning, it's very interesting. One of the most fascinating things about reading about the beginning was how fluid the ideas were. We look back and we think, okay, this is the way it was supposed to be. This is sort of the default of way a democracy looks. But no, you read about the Constitutional Convention and they had all these wacky ideas that if just a few people had voted differently,

We would be living in a world with three presidents, not just one president, but three presidents. You would have Donald Trump and Mitt Romney and Joe Biden all as president. It might be crazy. Or there was a movement to get rid of states because states is a weird idea. How can you have two governments? Why is there a state government and a federal government? How can you serve two masters is what one of the delegates said.

Srini Rao:

Mm -hmm.

AJ Jacobs

So this idea of fluidity and flexibility and entrepreneurialship among the founding fathers is one I love because I think we get stuck and are very rigid. But one of the things I really admire, and they have their flaws, they have their good and their bad, but one of the parts that I admire is how flexible they were, how willing, and we talked about this last time, the importance of being flexible, changing your mind, being open.

One of my favorite quotes from Ben Franklin at the convention, he said, the older I get, the less certain I am of my opinions, which I love. And I also love the very last words of James Madison, the father of the Constitution. He was on his deathbed and he said to his niece, he said, oh, I changed my mind. And she's like, about what? And he died. So we'll never know. It could be about.

Congress, it could be about soup, who knows what it was, but just the fact that these people were so willing to evolve and change and argue and not be so staunchly dug in to their opinions that nothing will budge them, which is where we are at now with politics. It's so tribal and so stuck in, and not just politics, but culture at large. We all...

and I speak for myself too, are very hard to get us to evolve and change our minds. I'm trying to change that for myself, but that is a huge problem that we face.

Srini Rao:

Well, do you think there's a solution to that problem? Because it seems like it's just getting worse and worse day by day. Like I don't remember. I was watching something the other night on the news. Uh, no, it was about media and truth. It was a, some YouTube channel, Journeyman Pictures, and they were showing these interviews with all these people and how they were, they were talking about the Trump inauguration where they showed the actual photographs.

Like this is photographic evidence to people they showed and 15 % of people who saw the photos still believed that there were more people at the Trump inauguration looking at a photograph that clearly shows it.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, yeah.

AJ Jacobs

Right, no, our confirmation bias is huge. And we are, I was actually just writing about this because Goodreads asked me to write sort of updates on the Bible book as the Constitution book. And there's a line by a poet who said, we both read the Bible day and night. You see black and I see white. And I feel that that's very, that's.

sort of a poetic way to say that confirmation bias exists, that when we read something, we see what we want to see, and it's very hard for us to change our mind. And weirdly, my Bible book was an example of confirmation bias, because people would write me emails, hundreds of emails from secular people saying, thank you for showing me how crazy religion is. You know, you really did a job.

and then religious people, same amount, hundreds would say, thank you for reaffirming my faith and showing the good in religion. So it was hilarious to see. But to your question of can we change it, I am optimistic that there are ways that we can change our mind. One of them I talked about last time is adopting the puzzle mindset. So when you go to talk to someone who's on the opposite side of the political spectrum, instead of seeing it as a debate, as a war,

try to have envisioned as a puzzle, why do we disagree? Why do we believe what we believe? Is there evidence that I can present or that she can present that would make us change our mind? And if we do still disagree, where can we go from there? Is there still some joint action we can take that will make the world better? So all of these things. And then just another...

The thing we need to do in culture is start to value the, when people say, oh, I was wrong, that's seen as a sort of a badge of shame. It shouldn't be a badge of honor. It should be like, congratulate, you are a hero for admitting you're wrong. You know, that you made a mistake. I make mistakes, we all make mistakes. If I'm looking at a website or a news source that never admits they're wrong,

AJ Jacobs

then I'm like, this is a very bad way to go about processing information because we're all wrong some of the time.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, yeah, I think the thing that also struck me was how funny this was. Like you literally lived as if it was the era of the Constitution. This is one of my favorite quotes from the book. He said, when I told my wife, Julie, that I plan to live for a year constitutionally muskets, quill pens, and all her reaction was not huzzah. She was no fan of my year of living biblically. For starters, she hated the beard. She didn't kiss me for seven months. Is that true? She didn't actually kiss you. And then she said, I'm not going to churn butter.

AJ Jacobs

True. No.

She did say that and she never had to, she never had to, but she did have to do other things. I did get her in a bonnet and the corset and all of that. Yeah, well, part of the book is sort of looking at the Constitution from a historical point of view that we've talked about, but part of it was living it because that's what I love to do. So I put on the tricorn hat, I baked, I made 18th century food with cloves and I...

I wrote with a quill pen and I quartered a soldier, because the third amendment says that you don't have to have a soldier stay in your house. That was a big deal back then, because the British would stay in people's house, the soldiers. But it is also my right, if I consent, to have a soldier stay over. So I had this nice soldier come in, stay for a few days. And I had a musket that I carried around the Upper West Side of New York, which was...

very mixed reactions. Some people were like, what the hell is going on? I will say it came in handy. One time I was, uh, I arrived at a coffee shop at the same time as this other guy and he said, you go first. I am not going to mess with a guy holding an 18th century musket. So that was nice. And it's big and heavy. It's 10 pounds. So that was, uh, that was fascinating. And I will say.

There was much about 18th century life that we are so, we should be so grateful we don't have to, you know, just even doing the dishes. There was no sinks, there was no faucet in the kitchen. You had to lug the water. I tried to replicate it by lugging water from my bathroom into the kitchen. So that's the best I could do. But that said, there were aspects that I think were wonderful. And one of them was writing with a quill pen, which, uh,

AJ Jacobs

I loved just the sound of this. It had sort of an ASMR sound like scratch, scratch, scratch. But the best part about it was that I was away from my devices. There were no pings, no dings. There was no temptation to go and click on the internet. It allowed me, I believe, to think much more deeply and much more profoundly about these topics.

And so I am, you know, you don't have to use a quill pen. You can use a pencil, a crayon, a pen, whatever. But I do think writing away from a computer is a wonderful exercise.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, I mean, you said if the world returned to quills, would we see a decline in trolls and rage writing maybe, or what if the founding fathers had written the constitution on a shared cloud document? Would they have ever come to an agreement? And like, just imagining trying to just, you know, imagine what that might look like today if like, you know, 30 senators were together trying to write an agreement. Like, I think kindergartners would come to an agreement faster than our Congress. Like that's, you know, which is mind boggling to me.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, my mess.

AJ Jacobs

So true. It is so true.

Srini Rao:

But let's get into some of the core ideas. First, let's talk about voting because this kind of made me laugh and smile and thought, oh, this is great. You said when George Washington ran for the Virginia State legislature in 1758, he provided voters with 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of hard cider. He won the election with more than 300 well -lubricated votes. So you mentioned that election day was like this.

celebratory thing where everybody was just getting shitfaced it sounds like.

AJ Jacobs

That's exactly right. And I don't reckon, I mean, there were, first of all, we should not go back totally to 18th century voting. It was sexist and racist and only men could vote. And I also don't think that it should be, you know, like a, you know, a frat party with everyone binge drinking. But I do like the idea that it was very festive. I mean, this, when the country first started, it was amazing to people that.

they could choose their leaders. This was an awe -inspiring fact, the first time in history that they had a say in their political leaders. So it was very festive. You had music, you had farmers markets, you had cakes. Election cakes were a huge deal. And people would bake them and they would be...

massive. Some of them were like 70 pounds and they would bring them to the polls and everyone would have cake and trade cake and have a good time. And I think we need to recapture some of that joy and festivity and awe at the idea that we can be a part of democracy. And actually that was one of the many quests in the book was that I started Operation Election Cake and I

got people in every one of the 50 states to bake an election cake and bring it to the polls or bring it to their work. And people were so happy to have a little positivity among all the negativity of elections that it really was lovely to see. And people were so grateful and they were so creative because people would do like in Georgia, they made

cake with peaches and Michigan cherries. I didn't know cherries were Michigan, but apparently they are. So it was lovely. And there is some evidence, there was a study a few years ago by some Yale political scientists who set up these little parties, festivals with music and it increased voter turnout by 7%.

AJ Jacobs

So it's just a better way to look at democracy as instead of this chore and this horrible thing that, you know, oh my God, let's look at it. This is amazing. We can participate in choosing our leaders. That is unusual in the history of the world and, you know, still in many countries around the world now.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, it's funny because when you mentioned that it made me think back to a trip that I took to Tijuana with a friend. And one of my friends always teased me. He said, let me get this straight. It's 4th of July weekend and you're going to go celebrate it by leaving the country. But we get there and the funniest thing, we'd driven like nine hours from Berkeley, we had a friend and we get into a bar and the guy's like, no alcohol. And we're like, get us a beer. And he was like, no, no, no alcohol. And we're like, what the hell?

AJ Jacobs

Ha ha!

AJ Jacobs

Ooh.

Srini Rao:

I'm like, why? He was like, because Mexican elections are happening and if we serve alcohol, nobody votes. Which is kind of funny to think like, yeah, that was, I had never heard that before, but it reminded me of that when you said that elections were festive.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, that is so interesting.

AJ Jacobs

Yeah, well, I guess they had to rearrange it so you could only get a drink after you voted. Like that was your reward. Maybe that's the secret for that. Yeah, I actually, I did bring rum punch. I'm gonna do it again in November, and this time I'm going without the rum punch, because one of the election workers,

Srini Rao:

Yeah.

AJ Jacobs

asked me for rum punch and I didn't know what to do. Like are they allowed to have rum? And I was like, well, she's an adult. So I guess I have to give it to her. So I hope I didn't skew the election that way.

Srini Rao:

Well, you know, I think the other thing that struck me was voting by voice. Like you said, you tried to do that and that wasn't acceptable.

AJ Jacobs

Well, yes, this was fascinating to learn that the secret ballot was not the way they voted in early America. Most people voted by voice. You would arrive at the poll and then you would say out loud, sometimes in front of a crowd, I wanna vote for X or Y. And in one sense, it was very embarrassing, because I did it. I went into my New York City.

cafeteria of a public school and I said, I'd like to vote for Kathy Hochul for governor. I just, I said it right out loud and the woman who worked at the polls was like, shh, shh, shh, you can't say that. That is not allowed. You've got this is, and I said, well, that's the way our founding fathers voted. She said, times have changed. So I can no longer vote by voice. The advantage of voting by voice is I suppose to take the taboo off.

I don't recommend it because I don't want voter intimidation and people to feel like they have to vote one way or the other. But I do like the idea that, you know, votes should not be like hemorrhoids. They should not be something we're ashamed of. It's, you know, in an ideal democracy, you should be loud and proud and say, I'm voting for this and this is the reason why.

Srini Rao:

Well, that makes a perfect segue to talking about free speech. You said the free speech that we know is mostly a modern phenomenon. The founding fathers meant something vastly different when they talked about free speech. And you say it was more restricted back then. At the time of our country's founding, free speech meant books, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, and chats at the local tavern. It did not mean viral tweets or doxing or ratioing. The framers wanted speed bumps. Speech should be refined by literate and educated people such as newspaper editors. Now,

You're a long time writer, a long time journalist. And it's kind of funny because in one way the internet is like, it has been a blessing because people like me are able to produce shows like this with virtually no formal training. And I don't think that that's a bad thing. I think we democratize the ability to speak, but I also think that it had downsides that most of us never anticipate.

AJ Jacobs

Right.

AJ Jacobs

Yes.

Srini Rao:

Basically, I think the framers of the Constitution thought about speed bumps. Clearly, the people who built the internet didn't think twice about it.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, that is such a great point. Exactly. And there are pros and cons. I am generally a very strong free speech supporter. So it was very interesting to see that the founders were not what I would consider big free speech advocates. And it depended on the founding father, but the state laws at the time, there were blasphemy laws.

I tried to reinstitute that for my family. So.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, that was hilarious. So you're gonna tell me about that, like, your blasphemy laws with the kids.

AJ Jacobs

Yeah, blasphemy and cursing in New York state. It was every time you cursed or said damn, or you had to pay 37 and a half cents. That was the fine to the government. And I tried to re -institute that and I thought I'm gonna make a lot of money. My kids were able to weasel out of it. They're like, I don't have a half cent, so let's just wait until I get to 75 cents. But then they would curse again and get to 112 and.

Srini Rao:

Hahaha!

AJ Jacobs

to have, so it was a nightmare. But it was fascinating to see that there was much more of a concern about, there was much more of a sense that people should not be allowed to say whatever they want. And this was interesting because their notions of rights were very different than ours. We now tend to think of rights as more absolute.

Like I have the right to free speech and that's it. But they saw, they believed we are born with natural rights. But once we enter a society with other people, we've entered a social contract and our rights must be balanced against the common good. And often the common good would win. So it was really interesting to see. And one of my takeaways was I do like the idea of this one constitutional scholar talks about,

We should have in a modern democratic pluralistic society, we should have a lot of rights, more rights than we think we have, more than just the ones mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but they should be not as strong. They should be balanced. You have a right to free speech, but I have a right to watch a play and not be disturbed by people shouting.

about whatever they're protesting. So you've got to balance the rights. It's a much more about balancing than it is about rights as total trump cards.

Srini Rao:

death. Well, you also wrote about the Sedition Act and you actually said that Congress passed the 1798 Sedition Act, a law that undoubtedly considered perfectly constitutional. The Sedition Act said that Americans could be punished for false scandals and malicious statements against the government and it resulted in dozens of prosecutions. If that were the case today, literally every journalist that wrote a single thing during the Trump presidency would be in jail right now.

AJ Jacobs

Oh yeah, and what about late night talk show hosts? They would be overflowing with people who committed sedition according to this. And they were serious. There was one man, a Massachusetts man, who was thrown in jail because he made an ass joke about John Adams. John Adams was the one who was behind the Sedition Act. And he came to a...

Srini Rao:

Yeah.

Srini Rao:

Yeah.

AJ Jacobs

He came to a celebration and there were all of these, this pomp and circumstance. There were these cannons that went off to celebrate his presence. And this guy made a joke, like, you know, not a great joke, but he said, I wish the cannon ball would go right up his arse. And someone overheard it, reported it, and he went to jail. It was, it wasn't Stalin rush up, but it was not what we picture today as free speech. And I am very grateful.

for the 21st century notion of free speech. And I am worried that it's being from all sides that we're getting pressure to have more restricted speech. It's a complicated issue and I see the pros and cons, but I am very grateful we don't live in John Adams America.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, and apparently you tweeted to somebody that they violated this addition act.

AJ Jacobs

I did. I felt it was my duty. That was part of my duty was to inform people when I felt they were doing something that might be considered unconstitutional. And the other one, I never, I didn't follow up too much, but there was a Connecticut law in the early 1800s that banned jugglers and magicians and gymnasts or people who could, I think they distort their body or something like that.

So yeah, I happen to like magic, but if I were a magic hater, I could whip that law out and say, listen, this is un -American.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, let's talk about privacy because you say that basically the fourth amendment originally applied to just physical objects such as paper and ink documents, but now includes the contents of your smartphone. And I thought about that and it just like, it made me think of the Patriot Act in terms of, I mean, there's literally, isn't the government basically allowed to go and just, you know, seize your home with no search and seizure, like with no warrant?

AJ Jacobs

Mmm.

AJ Jacobs

Yeah, it's a problem. I think the problem is, I feel that one person now can do so much more damage than they could back then. So in the 1700s, there were bombs, so you could blow something up, but there were not nuclear bombs, there were not dirty bombs, there were not bio weapons. So the stakes are higher.

And I don't know the answer. It is again, it's a balance of the right to privacy versus the right to live and feel some safety in society. And it's a complicated, I don't have an answer. I have answers, I am gonna go with like Ben Franklin said, that the older I get, the less sure I am of my opinions. I feel strong opinions about some areas.

But this idea of privacy, I don't know what to make of it. What do you make of it?

Srini Rao:

I'm with you. It's kind of a tough one. It's like you say, you know, like somebody could be sitting in at their computer. I like, I thought about this in the context of AI when I was like, okay, they're obviously safeguards. Like you can't put, I need the schematics for a bomb into chap GPT, but I thought I'm like, okay, let's say I'm writing a new pilot for a new season of 24 to bring it back. And I need the schematics for a bomb. Yeah.

AJ Jacobs

Hmm, right. Right. Yeah, exactly. What do you do with that? I mean, a lot of free speech is premised on the idea that the truth will win, that the truth, if everyone is allowed to say their lies, their falsehood, their dis and misinformation, and also the truth, the truth is gonna win, the marketplace of ideas. And the best, now what worries me is,

that I think that sometimes the falsehoods, the conspiracies win because they're more fun. It's more fun to believe that there's a secret cabal controlling the world than that it's sort of messy chaos at the top and no one knows what they're doing. So I am worried that the marketplace of ideas does not work, but I don't know what the options, what else there is.

So I still am a fan of the marketplace of ideas. And I just hope that the truth, if we can make it interesting enough, if we can sell it, if we can, or if we can get people to be okay with the truth, which is often nuanced and complicated and sometimes a little boring, we've got to, as a society, start to embrace that instead of like the exciting flashy conspiracy theories, which are more fun to believe.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Supreme Court. You said that basically the Supreme Court meets every year from October to June or July and agrees to hear about 100 to 150 cases. You can observe the oral arguments in person if you can secure one of the 439 seats in the courtroom. Most are taken up by lawyers, journalists, VIPs, and people involved in the case, but 50 spots are reserved for the public. And you say that today's SCOTUS is undoubtedly not what the founders had imagined.

First of all, whenever I think about something that is being heard by the Supreme Court, I imagine it's some sort of high profile case. Is that always true or are there a lot of things we don't hear about that are just completely irrelevant?

AJ Jacobs

Oh yeah, no, there's tons of cases that you will never hear of. And it's the high profile ones, of course, that get all. I wanted to go to the Supreme Court because they are the ones in our current system who decide what is and is not constitutional. And you can, you can wait in line. I got up at three in the morning. I stayed at a hotel in DC and I waited in line for six hours. And I was outraged because there was,

apparently you can hire someone to be a professional line waiter for you for 200 bucks and then just waltz in at 9 a .m. which I found like this is supposed to be the the bastion of of equality and fairness and justice and this did not seem fair this system maybe I was just annoyed that I didn't hire someone and didn't find out about it but I got in there and one thing that struck me is

just the way that the building looks. And it looks like a Roman temple that we should be sacrificing oxen to these gods in black robes. And this was because William Howard Taft in the 1920s, he was Chief Justice. He wanted a building to rival the White House and the Capitol. But that is not the way the founders envisioned the

Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was very much the third, the third among the three. It was not meant to be as powerful as it is today. And it has gone out in my opinion, and many scholars opinions, the idea that these nine unelected people have so much say over where we go to college, over who we can hire, who we can marry, where we can worship. It's.

crazy that this system and it's not what the founders envisioned. The founders envisioned the much smaller humble court that it was even like it was on the second floor of a building where there were butchers and markets and it was meant to have some say in what is constitutional but the other branches should be in there too.

AJ Jacobs

The president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court all work together and weigh in on what they think is constitutional. Now what we have is judicial supremacy, where everyone thinks, oh, the Supreme Court has final say. That is not what most of the founding fathers would have agreed to. And this is according to some of the best scholars that I interviewed, like Jonathan Gnap of Stanford, who I think is brilliant. So yeah, I think the Supreme Court is...

It's out of control. And the very least we should have term limits that you should only be allowed to serve for 18 years. The idea that you can be on there for 40 years until your 90s and deciding cases about AI in your 90s and when you barely know how to use a cell phone, it's insanity.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, you know, the this is another thing you mentioned was cruel and unusual punishment. And I noticed you didn't write much about prison in this book. But you got me when, you know, just going back and like looking at that, I don't know if you've ever seen Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next documentary. It's really fascinating. He goes to all these different countries to look at their various social policies to bring them back to the United States.

AJ Jacobs

I haven't.

Srini Rao:

He kind of just jokes. He's like, we fucked everything up. So like, he's like, I'm gonna go to Western countries and see, you know, and he goes to places like in Slovenia, college is completely free. And when they tried to put tuition in the students around the world revolted, of course, in the United States, nobody does a damn thing. But one of the things he does is he goes to a prison in Norway, a maximum security facility. And he's talking to the warden of the prison.

AJ Jacobs

Hmm.

AJ Jacobs

Right.

Srini Rao:

And he, he looks at him and he says, I don't get it. Like, where is the punishment? He was like, the, they're living on an Island. They're cooking the, you know, he's talking to a murderer. There's a guy, you know, behind him. They all live in houses. Like you look at it. And he said, I don't get what the punishment is here. And he said, the purpose of this is to take away their freedom, not to dehumanize them. And, and the, the Wharton said something that I stayed with me. He said, you know, I don't understand why this idea is so.

AJ Jacobs

Mm -hmm.

Srini Rao:

odd to you because it is actually one of your own ideas, no cruel or unusual punishment. Yet, I mean, if we look at it, honestly, I think of all the things that would make me kill myself, if I knew that I was going to spend time in prison, I'd be like, you know what the hell with it? I'm going to kill myself. That sounds like way more like pleasant than going to prison.

AJ Jacobs

Mmm.

AJ Jacobs

Interesting. Well, I think I love that you say that. I think a lot of the founding fathers were very interested in reform as opposed to punishment. I mean, there are two main reasons to put someone in jail or to punish them. One is sort of this revenge and the other is deterrence and reform and trying to make sure they never do it again. And these men were men of the enlightenment.

And the Enlightenment was the first time in history where people said, oh, we shouldn't be doing this purely out of revenge to make them suffer because they made someone else suffer. We should be doing it to try to make them better. And it's interesting because they were progressive and reformists, and yet they were in the 18th century. So their reforms to us seemed barbaric.

Like Thomas Jefferson proposed that gay people should be castrated instead of killed. And this was like, wow, what a liberal progressive policy. But to them, this was a step forward. But yeah, I think that we have lost some of that idea that punishment should not just be for men. I think it should almost.

completely be for reform and for making the world better because you can't take back, you can't take back the bad things that they've done. So let's just try to make sure that people don't do it in the future.

Srini Rao:

Yeah, it's funny, I was watching Con Air with my cousin the other night and they quoted Dostoevsky where he says, I'm paraphrasing so you'll have to check me on the exact wording, but he said, Dostoevsky said that you can judge the dignity of a society by the way it treats its prisoners after he had served some time. Yeah. And.

AJ Jacobs

Mmm, that's a great quote. Yeah It's like you can tell someone on a date how they're how they treat the the waitstaff I feel there's something there. Maybe not maybe not a metaphor. Maybe not like

Srini Rao:

Mm -hmm.

Srini Rao:

No, I'm with you on that. That's definitely a good, good lamb, you know, good test. Well, okay. So I think the only thing I want to talk about, let's talk about race because clearly, you know, slavery was allowed at this time. And obviously that's absurd. And even the 13th amendment, there was a documentary about this where they profiled all these people and the way, you know, like the basic sort of idea was it was.

a way to get around racism and still put lots of black people in jail, as we saw in the 80s because the punishments for crack were like, the sentences for crack were substantially higher than those for cocaine.

AJ Jacobs

Mm -hmm.

AJ Jacobs

Right. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, it was a racist time and there were people, delegates who owned enslaved people. So I have a chapter on race and the two, one of my heroes is Frederick Douglass and I spoke to a great black professor who had deep thoughts on race and

What I like about Douglas is he was, there were two ways. He was around the Civil War. He was an abolitionist and a former enslaved person. So there are two ways you can look at the Constitution. You can look at it and say, all right, well, this was written by these, some of them were owned enslaved people, so let's burn it. That it is a deal with the devil. And that is what,

the one of the most famous abolitionists at the time, William Lloyd Garrison said, he said, this is a document from the devil. He literally burned it in front of a crowd. He burned the Constitution. Initially, Frederick Douglass was with him and said, yes, this we got to get completely rid of the Constitution. But Douglas changed his mind. He decided to take another tack, which was let's look at the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence.

as promissory notes, because they have language, even though the people who signed it, some of them were hypocrites, it talks about liberty and equality and freedom. So let's make the Constitution live up to its promises. So instead of envisioning it as a deal with the devil, let's look at it as a promissory note, a promissory note that people will be equal and.

and treated regardless of race. And this is the language that was adopted by Martin Luther King and by Obama in a great speech on race, that we have to make America live up to the promises that it made in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. And I love that way of looking at it. I think, I just think,

AJ Jacobs

It's dangerous to try to start over with a new constitution because who knows what will result. There are some groups who want to return all the rights to the states and so it could go that way. It could be a disaster. So let's try to make the constitution live up to its best parts, just like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass advise.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. Well, let's talk about petitions and amendments. Like how does this even work? Because like when was the last, I had Chad's EPT just read a quick summary of the 15 amendments for me so I could reference them. But like, I don't even, you know, this is absurd, but I don't know when the last amendment to the constitution was and what it was.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, I'll tell you, it's been a while. I actually interviewed the guy who was behind it. It's a fascinating story. I won't get into it now, but it was in 19, I think 1992 was the last time an amendment was ratified. And the amendment was that Congress people cannot give themselves raises. They can only give raises to the next Congress, which is good. And actually it was one that Madison came up with and it was sort of sitting there like a zombie amendment for 200 years.

It had not been rejected or fully accepted. And this guy is like, let's make it accept. But yeah, it is very hard to get an amendment through, which is understandable. We shouldn't be able to willy nilly change the constitution because that's how authoritarianism works. On the other hand, they made it too hard. They didn't realize how hard they were making it. You know, you have to have two thirds of Congress approve of it.

and three quarters of the state legislatures and there are various other ways, but it's really hard, really hard. And the problem is they didn't foresee parties. They didn't foresee that we'd be stuck with these two major parties that refused to negotiate. So they thought it would be easier to get an amendment through. They knew they had written a flawed document.

George Washington said he wrote his nephew a couple weeks after the convention. He says this is an imperfect document, but they've built in ways to fix it with the fifth, the article five. But now I am worried we're not going to have an amendment for decades because we've got such, you know, we've got such fractionalization. And I would say the catch -22.

is that to fix the amendment process, we have to change the Constitution, and you can't do that with the current amendment process. So it's a bit of a catch -22, but it is one of the hardest constitutions in the world to change, and that is a big problem. And that is why I do believe when we're interpreting the Constitution, we have to have elasticity. You know, we have to...

AJ Jacobs

look at these words like equal protection and say, yeah, they didn't mean it to apply to gay marriage in 1868, but you know what, times have changed. Let's make it apply to gay marriage because we can't do a constitutional amendment for that. So we have to think of, I like to use a pants metaphor, the constitution, it should be, it's to have an elastic waistband. It shouldn't be totally falling down with no structure. There should be some,

limits and structure, but it shouldn't be a pair of skinny jeans that you gain two pounds and you split it wide open. So you have to have these words stretch a little so that the words like liberty and inequality mean slightly different things than they did back then.

Srini Rao:

So one other thing that struck me in the book is you say that imagine if politicians really were just the messengers of people's will. Imagine Ted Cruz saying, well, I don't agree with solar energy, but I've been instructed by my constituents to pass this bill. So I suppose I vote. Yeah, we basically have a direct democracy, perhaps unworkable, but interesting for sure. Obviously, I think you can imagine where I land on this. Like, I personally don't think politicians do a damn thing for the interest of the people. I mean, they talk a big game.

But I interviewed Andrew Yang and one of my big reasons to go with him was I was like, I'm a student who's buried in a mountain of student loan debt. I want Andrew Yang to get elected for that one reason alone. And then basically the moment, to this day I remember as a student, as somebody with debt, when somebody asked Kamala Harris about student loan debt, she said, I'm willing to have a conversation about it. I was like, that's a bullshit answer. That's not an answer, that's a dodge.

AJ Jacobs

Right?

AJ Jacobs

Right.

AJ Jacobs

Interesting. Right. Well,

Srini Rao:

Yeah, to me that was that summed it up in a nutshell. I was like, okay, you know what? How I'm going to get out of this debt is I'm going to wait for the government to implode.

AJ Jacobs

Interesting. So do you think, would you prefer where people voted more on referenda, so it was more direct democracy instead of elect...

Srini Rao:

So this brings up an interesting point and I remember reading about this somewhere. I think it was a book called super intelligence It's like why do you have an electoral college and it's like, okay, you're right There are probably things that people like you and I have no business on voting on because we don't know anything about it Right. So that makes sense like that that I was like, okay that kind of explains why we would have an electoral college Which we will get to we've got to move on from this in the interest of time So we let's do two things. We need to finish this up with talking about

AJ Jacobs

Right.

Srini Rao:

gun rights and the electoral college. So guns are without a question probably one of the most controversial issues like that is incredibly polarizing.

AJ Jacobs

Sure, happy to do.

AJ Jacobs

Yes, and so I have a whole chapter on that. And since I was trying to express my rights in the 1780s way, I went and I got myself a musket. I went on ye old internet and I bought an actual musket from the 1700s and I carried it around, as I said, on the Upper West Side and I shot it. I went, I joined a group of revolutionary war reenactors and we went to the shooting range and shot it.

Now what was fascinating about shooting it is, it is such a different experience than shooting a modern gun. You know, a semi -automatic, for instance, you just press the trigger as many times as you want. To shoot a musket is at least 15 steps. You've got to take out a little cartridge, you've got to bite it off, you've got to pour the gunpowder down the barrel, you've got to pour it into another place, you've got to take out the ramrod, ram it down, put the ramrod back. It takes a while.

So it is a very different instrument and it would be hard to do a mass shooting with a musket. So the debate is, and I talked to both sides, I tried to present both sides of the gun rights debate as fairly as possible. One side I think makes an interesting point that when they wrote Right to Bear Arms,

those arms were muskets. They had other ones and they were developing other ones, but it was a very different machine. So imagine if you wrote a law about wheeled vehicles, vehicles with wheels, and all that there was was bicycles. And then a couple hundred years later, we have 18 wheel trucks. What do we do? Do we adjust?

the law, yeah, you know, you have to make it different. So that's sort of the progressive argument against having very few restricts. That's the argument that we should be more regulatory with our guns because they are so different than they were in the 1700s.

Srini Rao:

Yeah. What about the electoral college? Because there is this part of me, like I said, when I saw that idea that, okay, yeah, there are probably a lot of things that people who have no knowledge should not be voting on, then it makes sense. On the flip side of that, like the popular vote doesn't determine who gets elected, even though that is what the majority of the people said they wanted. So it kind of doesn't reflect the true interest. It's kind of like a,

AJ Jacobs

Yeah.

Srini Rao:

There's a term for it. They call it something, some type of democracy when we have that. I don't remember the exact word. It's somewhere in my notes, but like, why is it there? Like I've heard certain things. I also read some that you may be able to correct. Like why is inauguration on, on in January? It turns out because it took that long for the newly elected president to get to Washington. I don't know how true that is.

AJ Jacobs

Oh, I love that. I hadn't heard that, but I'm gonna look into that. Yeah, I am not a fan of the Electoral College. I think that is one of the, they had some great ideas. As we said, they were experimenters, and this was a compromise that no one actually loved, the Electoral College, but it's what they came up with. Some of them didn't want the.

the people to directly elect the president. So they came up with this sort of Frankenstein solution. I think that it is not a good, because as we've seen, you can lose the popular vote and win the presidency. And it's more like a game. It's like a game of risk than it is like an actual democracy.

I think I would like to see us get rid of it. One of, there were many reasons for the electoral college, but one that I find really interesting and almost ironic now is that they wanted to prevent the people who they thought were often ignorant and easily misled. They wanted to prevent them from electing someone who might turn into a tyrant or an authoritarian.

Yeah, exactly. So they set up this buffer zone where you have these educated electors from every state. So if someone elected a crazy person, if a state elected a crazy person, the electors could be the adults in the room and say, oh no, that's just, this person is not fit to be president. Let's vote for this more rational person. So the idea that it was built to stop a demagogue and it has actually benefited people.

who are more demagoguish is a weird quirk of history.

Srini Rao:

Well, let's finish this up with two things. I mean, I think that, you know, the core sort of ending of the book is that in a lot of ways, what I got from this was that we take democracy for granted. Like we assume that, you know, this is always going to stay this way. And I think that unless you've spent, you know, an extended period of time in another country, it's hard to fathom the idea that this could go away. Like you could see it go away.

AJ Jacobs

Mm -hmm. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think, yeah, reading about the history, you can see that it is not the natural state. You know, we have to fight for it. Part of the book, the book starts and ends with a parable about that Ben Franklin told at the Constitutional Convention, because at the convention, George Washington sat in this wooden chair. And on the back of the chair was a carving of the sun.

but only half the sun. So you couldn't tell, you couldn't see the bottom half of the sun. So you didn't know, was it rising or was it setting? And at the end of the convention, when they finally, against all odds, created this document that everyone signed, Ben Franklin said, I decided at the end, it is a rising sun. The future of America is rising. The future of democracy is rising. And,

So I was, one question I tried to answer is the sun still rising on America, on our republic? And my answer is, I don't know. It's up to us. It's not like a sun where it's controlled by gravity, it's controlled by us. And it's fragile. So we have to be the ones who go out there and keep democracy going. And it could be little things like baking a democracy cake.

which we talked about, it could be trying to change, urge structural change, like get rid of gerrymandering or get rid of the super majority in the Senate, which we didn't talk about, which was not in the Constitution. So all of these things, we've got to really engage because it's very tempting and I feel the temptation all the time to just disengage and say, oh, they're all a bunch of crooks. It doesn't matter. I'm just going to give up.

Nothing ever changes, but things do change. It's just who is the one changing it?

Srini Rao:

Yeah, amazing. Well, as always, you've been fabulous and I want to finish my final question. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

AJ Jacobs

Well, that, I love that question. And I thought about it. I mean, one thing is that the, it's interesting because we've talked about the importance of mistakes and how it's good to experiment and do mistakes. So in one sense, I think paradoxically, this is almost like a Cohen, like being able to admit your mistakes makes you unmistakable, makes you extraordinary. So I would say.

That's my little paradoxical answer, that we should all embrace our imperfections and our mistakes and be proud when we change our mind to and admit that we were wrong and admit that we made mistakes, then we can become unmistakable.

Srini Rao:

Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with everybody. Where can people find out more about you, the new book, and everything else that you're up to?

AJ Jacobs

Ah, well, first of all, thank you. I love your show. I love your thoughts. And I'm honored to be on. The book is out. It's called The Year of Living Constitutionally. And I've got ajjacobs .com as my website and ajjacobs on all the socials. And that's it. I would love to interact. I want people to bake cakes, so join my movement.

Srini Rao:

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that..